A successful young British actress has just experienced one of those "I want to be alone" moments. While trekking in the Himalayas, Keira Knightley had noticed that what she liked most about her holiday was the fact that no one...
Read moreA mighty slab of autobiography, self-adoring, self-promoting and self-published, has just appeared in the bookshops. It will sell few copies - nearly 800 name-dropping pages about the life of a moderately successful businessman is not an obvious bestseller - but...
Read morePerhaps more than its executives would care to admit, British mainstream television throbs with the thin-blooded pulse of nostalgia. Top Gear reminds viewers of a time when it was all right for minor public school types to talk about cars...
Read moreIt would seem a fairly obvious rule of public life that references to daily, intimate activities be kept to a minimum. If a book called Tales from the Smallest Room were published, it would do little for the reputations of...
Read moreThose who watched, with snooty incredulity, news footage of effigy-burning and riots on the Indian sub-continent during cricket's World Cup would do well to take a glance at the reaction of English sports writers and bloggers to the elimination of...
Read moreHow quaint that phrase "kiss and tell" is beginning to sound. It suddenly seems to belong to a lost age of polite euphemism, like "taking a liberty" or "no better than she should be". When some knackered old court correspondent,...
Read moreIt has been a bumper month for A-list animal celebrities. Knut, Berlin Zoo's famous polar bear cub, has made the front cover of Vanity Fair, posing in a faked-up photograph with Leonardo DiCaprio. According to that great style magazine, Knut...
Read moreWhen the shaggy libertarians of the love generation first pioneered the idea of the internet, they believed it would be an instrument for free expression, democracy and anarchy. Taking hippie values into the cybernetic age, it would bring the kind...
Read moreHow is your mindset today? At the start of a long weekend, with spring in the air, it will probably be in an acceptable state. If for some unhappy reason it is not, you will be reassured to know that...
Read moreOn the track, a horse is on fire. A snow-white Lippizaner on a long rein, it makes its way slowly, trembling and wide-eyed, past the grandstand at Nad Al Sheba racecourse in Dubai. It is almost nine at night and,...
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